Prague, June 30 (CTK) – The Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) certainly will not support the new cabinet of ANO and the Social Democrats (CSSD) because PM Andrej Babis formed a pro-Brussels, pro-immigration coalition instead of a patriotic government, SPD leader Tomio Okamura told today’s issue of daily Pravo.
“We can never support such a government, it goes completely against our programme,” he said.
President Milos Zeman appointed the minority government of ANO and the CSSD on Wednesday. The Communists (KSCM) confirmed today that they would support the government so that I can win the confidence vote in the lower house of parliament in July.
In the late 2017 election, the SPD movement won 22 seats in the 200-member lower house. Okamura is one of the house’s deputy heads. The SPD is opposed to immigration, Islam and the EU.
Okamura said he believed that President Zeman wanted the SPD to be part of the government in the spring. “We repeatedly talked about it with Milos (Zeman). “It seemed to me that he, too, can see that the only parties willing to work in the lower house are ANO, the SPD and the KSCM,” he said.
He said the plan changed after German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Babis in April according to speculations by the German media which openly speculated about Merkel’s contribution to the formation of Babis’s second government.
Okamura said Babis all of a sudden offered very advantageous conditions to the Social Democrats, such as five ministries.
After the CSSD left the negotiating table in the spring, Babis planned to ally with the KSCM and the SPD as was recommended to him by Zeman, but a large part of his ANO movement was against cooperation with the “extremist” SPD.
“Babis has a lot of his own interests in Germany and he needs to have good relations with the European Union, also because of the EU subsidies,” Okamura said, referring to the businesses that the billionaire Babis owned in Germany and the EU funds that the Czech Republic can draw.
Babis was the sole owner of the huge Agrofert concern which includes chemical, food and wood-processing firms and media outlets. In early 2017, Babis, then finance minister, had to transfer Agrofert to trust funds to comply with a new law.
Okamura said Zeman seemed to have no other choice than to appoint the ANO-CSSD government due to the time pressure.
“I expect that after the eight months of suffering when Andrej Babis totally failed as a leader and was incapable of making a deal with anybody at all, the president felt he could not prolong it any further,” Okamura told Pravo.
The Czech Republic has been stagnating and not a single major political bill has been pushed through, he said, adding that Babis’s first cabinet neither addressed the pension, welfare and judicial reforms nor helped people who fell in the debt trap.
Okamura said the SPD managed to push the referendum bill to the second reading in the lower house of parliament. “There is also the proposal that even the departure from the EU can be considered. This is enormous success,” he said.
Okamura said he wanted justice minister Robert Pelikan, defence minister Karla Slechtova and foreign minister Martin Stropnicky (all ANO) to leave the government already in 2017.
Pelikan, Slechtova and Stropnicky represented the liberal wing of the ANO movement and they criticised Okamura. Neither of them is part of Babis’s second government.
Okamura said the biggest scandal was the fact that CSSD MEP Miroslav Poche, whom Zeman rejected as foreign minister, would control the Foreign Ministry. Poche called for accepting migrants based on quotas on his blog in 2015, which proves that Poche was absolutely unaware of the threat, if nothing else, Okamura added.
A man like Poche can have no foreign policy vision, he said.
“He (Poche) is the same as Merkel who is surprised what she caused. The woman is crazy, she devastated Europe for whole generations only because she did not see two or three years in the future,” Okamura told the paper.
He said no German party is against Brussels, not even the Alternative for Germany (AfD) because the Germans have the feeling that they lead Europe, that they are the leaders.
When asked about the latest EU summit on migration, Okamura said Babis presented its conclusions in an untrue, manipulative way. “We are not even at the beginning. A majority will to zero tolerance of illegal migration was not expressed,” he said.
Okamura said the summit reached an agreement on migration thanks to the patriotic parties in Italy and Babis or other European socialists did not contributed to it in any way.
He said the proposed Dublin IV regulation is even worse than the abandoned quotas.
Moreover, the United Nations clearly exerts pressure on EU states to open to migrants and accept them from Africa and Islamic countries, Okamura said. “The biggest disaster since the end of World War Two is coming,” he added.
He rejected the view that he scares Czechs with migrants though they have not been coming to the country. The wall needs to be built before the flooding, not after it, he said.
“Even Andrej Babis called the National Security Council to discuss what would be done after the Germans close their border. We can’t do anything, we don’t have a border police… Everybody knows we are not prepared,” Okamura said.
He said the Eurosceptic parties want to succeed in the 2019 elections to the European Parliament and win at least two fifths of the seats. The Eurosceptic parties want to replace the EU with the Union of European Nations, without the Brussels diktat, which would mean a return to the European Economic Area based on the free movement of persons, goods, services and capital.
If the reform of the EU failed, “we would like a referendum and I would vote for the departure (of the Czech Republic) from the EU,” Okamura said.